Bay Adelaide Centre, Toronto, Canada

Toronto goes transparent

WZMH Architects create a new landmark for Toronto's downtown

The Bay Adelaide Centre is a signature 51-storey tower in downtown Toronto. It is distinguished by its elemental, modernist form - a refined rectangular plan with notched corners - and a prism-like skin of clear vision and fritted glass that make it one of the downtown core’s most transparent towers.

At the top of the tower, the extension of the glass skin beyond the rooftop becomes a series of ‘sails’ that gives the building profile a distinctive identity. The highly transparent tower base seamlessly incorporates the historic façade of the National Building on Bay Street (Chapman and Oxley, 1926) and the lobby features a major integrated public art project by the world-renowned artist James Turrell.

The project is the first phase of a three tower complex featuring a half-acre landscaped urban plaza with Gingko trees and ornamental grasses framing benches and open seating area. This contributes a much-needed public open space to the central business district. The lobby floors and the plaza are clad in a ‘carpet’ of Brazilian Ipanema granite expressing a modernist sensibility for spatial continuity from inside to out.

Certified to a LEED Gold standard, the project is among Canada’s largest sustainable buildings and is estimated to have an energy cost savings of 47% as compared to and existing model building within the Canadian MNECB rating system. The tower contains over 100,840 sq m of rentable class-AAA office space, as well as over 3,700 sq m of below-grade retail space linked to the extensive underground concourse network.